NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22193, 21 August 1935, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

EPOCHS OF CHANGE It was an interesting and, indeed, fascinating epoch in which they now lived, said Karl Winter-ton, M.P., in a recent speech in England. Three great coupled epochs had shaken Europe since the fall of Rome—the Renaissance and the Reformation, which created a new western world; the industrial and French revolutions, which created eventually the world which they knew as Victorian; and the Great War, coupled with mechanised scientific invention, which had swept away the world of pre-1914. All these convulsions and now births had caused much suffering, cruelty and tribulation, and much heart-searching in Church and State, but he would be a bold man who would say that no benefits had followed in such epochs of change. The unhappy people were those who would neither accept nor adjust themselves to the change. The happy people were those who did. WIRELESS " DRIPPINGS " Replying to the charge that little response had bfeen made by the schools to the activities on their behalf of the British Broadcasting Corporation, Mr. G. H. Riding, headmaster of Aklenham School, said that at Aldenham they did practically nothing in that way. He added, advisedly, that although ho recognised that there was a great deal of interest in the use of the wireless and of the film, and although those things could be a stimulus to the growing mind, he thought their value was exceedingly small in the intellectual life of a school, and anything like the replacement of the ordinary work of a school by these things he would very strongly deprecate. He could not say that any drippings by instruments from which they got certain noises by turning on taps were going to be a substitute for the quiet application of the mind that did so much for the intellect and the character.

PEACE CONVENTIONS IN WAR

"A gain of the utmost value" is how the Spectator describes the recent disclosure by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir B. Kyres-Monsell, in the House of Commons, that Germany in the new naval agreement has renounced resort to unrestricted submarine warfare. It is foolish, proceeds the Spectator, to disparage such an undertaking by the argument that nations at war do not abide by conventions. That, as the Minister pointed out, means a policy of despair. A belligerent who treats agreements as "scraps of paper" or adopts any course that outrages neutral opinion is weighting the dice against himself, as was proved in the last war. Even in Avar no country wishes to put itself palpably in the wrong. The world to-day can only seek security in the confidence either that agreements will be honoured, or, if not, that the breach will damage most the party that is guilty of it.

FRAGILITY OF DEMOCRACY f Speaking in the House of Lords on the India Bill, the Bishop of Exeter opposed the proposals for granting self government to and delivered an attack on democracy everywhere "Everybody has spoken with regard to responsible government as if it were something new, something that dates with the telephone and the motor-car; we cannot hope to have much instruction from what has happened to our forefathers; we must take risks, try experiments," said the Bishop of Exeter. " Of course democracy existed both in Greece and Rome, and it has been tried again and again ever since, and, as Lord Bryce reminded us in his great book on democracy, it has shown this characteristic —its great fragility. You start it with a great paean of praise, a great flourish of trumpets, only to find a very few years afterward that it has gone." The bishop backed his assertion by illustrations taken from the United States, Italy and Germany.

league in the balance

The great issue raised for Britain by the Abyssinian crisis is, according to the Spectator, whether the League of Nations is to survive or be abandoned. It will survive, however truncated and paralysed temporarily, if Italy leaves it, the Spectator continues. It will be dead in fact if not in name if its principles are deliberately betrayed by countries like Great Britain and France in order that a war of aggression and aggrandisement by Italy against another member of the League may be condoned. Whenever the League stands by its principles it gains influence and authority. Whenever it abandons it is ignored and contemned. In the present emergency there are three possibilities. The League may give way and lose everything. It may stand fast and avert the Abyssinian war altogether. It may stand fast and fail to avert it, but still keep intact a foundation on which its structure can be restored in saner days. The one fatal po li C y_f a tal to all hope of world-peace —would be the first. EINSTEIN'S NEW THEORY Dr. Albert Einstein announced in New York last month that, in collaboration with Dr. N. Rosen at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, he had opened a possibility —stupendous in its implications—of accounting for atomic phenomena by the method of general relativity, writes the New York correspondent of the Times. Hitherto a great gulf has separated the theory of relativity and the quantum theory, but now with a first successful step already taken there seems to the two collaborators to be a chance of developing an all-embracing physical and mathematical theory which would include macrocosm and microcosm, tho universe as a whole as well as the atom. Tho "theoretical method" which Dr. Einstein and Dr. Rosen are exploring is published in the Physical Review of tho American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics. The collaborators "justify," as they say, its publication now "because it provides a clear procedure, characterised bv a minimum of assumptions, the carrying out of which has no other difficulties to overcome than those of a mathematical nature." They frankly admit that though tho first step toward formulating a universal theory has been taken successfully they do not know yet whether the next ones will follow logically; but it is plain that they are more than merely hopeful that they will.